On Monday, February 5, 2008, the White House released its proposed budget for the Fiscal year 2009(10/1/08-9/30/09). The figures show an astounding $541billion allocated to military spending alone, while the entire total of all other discretionary spending barely registers over $ 450 billion. That is over 54% of all discretionary dollars, and that does not include a single cent to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That $172.4 billion drain on vital resources is still to be debated, but will ultimately be passed by a compliant Congress too unsure of its own strength of character to risk being labeled “unsupportive” of the troops. The budget request simultaneously asks that the temporary tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 be made permanent, representing a windfall for the wealthiest Americans while providing a trickle of relief to the lower 60% of American household incomes. This combination of misguided priorities will further contribute to projected deficits of over $815 billion over the next two years-- deficits that we will ask our children, and our children's children, to pay for. They will be burdened with this massive debt at a time that we should be expanding the possibilities of the American dream for them, not destroying their hopes for the future.
Gloria Steinem once famously remarked, “A nation's budget is a reflection of its moral character.” If that is so, and the simplistic truth of this observation is self evident, we have a serious moral character issue facing the United States today. Let's take a look at some of the numbers from the fiscal year 2008 to 2009.
-- 5% INCREASE from FY 2008 to FY 2009 for Pentagon and related war spending
-- 2.1% CUT from Child Care and Development Block Grant
-- 5.4 % CUT from Improving Teacher Quality State Grants (so much for funding No Child Left Behind)
-- 15.9% CUT from Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (at a time of sharply rising energy costs)
These types of budget priorities have resulted in the United States ranking 16th out of 18 high income Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development nations on the United Nations Human Poverty index- with an astounding 20% of its population lacking functional literacy skills, an equally disturbing 11.8% of its citizens projected to not survive to age 60, and an 18th out of 18 ranking with 17% of its population living on less than 50% of the median income.
We could fill pages and pages with additional numbers regarding specific weapons programs that are unnecessary, outmoded, or unproven like the F-22 Raptor Fighter (designed to establish air superiority over soviet jets that were never built), the Ospry jump jet (which the Secretary of Defense tried to stop in 1989), and the Virginia class submarine (which has a 97% mission overlap with the current Los Angeles class nuclear sub) - but I fear by the end of the list we would be numb to the numbers.
What is clear and evident is the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex has, over the past 47 years, grown into the dangerous usurper of resources that President Eisenhower so eloquently warned against in 1961. And that two of the three giant triplets that Martin Luther King warned about in 1967, Extreme Materialism and Militarism, are now threatening the very core of the American dream. And so we must begin to talk to our friends, neighbors and co-workers about how this disastrous policy of funding unending war at the expense of our children's future will leave them without real security at all. We must demand from our representatives in congress a realistic assessment of threat - and no more platitudes about the “war on terror”. We must understand that security takes many forms, not just military, and a powerful economy is made up of rich opportunities for a broad cross section of the population, not just the wealthy few. We must do these things now, before it is too late.